Following the rising trend of backend workflows, open-source startup Inngest recently garnered attention by securing a $3 million seed investment spearheaded by GGV. The innovation-centered company provides the tech community with tools for creating and organizing serverless queues, background jobs, and workflows.
The formations of Inngest can be traced back to 2021 when former CTO of Buffer, Dan Farrelly, and Tony Holdstock-Brown, previously a Docker engineer and the leading figure of engineering at healthcare firm Uniform Teeth, partnered up. The company aims to revolutionize the queuing paradigm that has long lacked innovation, according to Holdstock-Brown, Inngest's CEO. The ability to transmit a message and schedule an execution in the future ties queues and events together. Still, queuing innovation has been neglected despite the high-level focus on events and event-driven architecture.
Over the years, technologies like NATS, Kafka, and real-time databases such as ClickHouse have caught significant attention. Holdstock-Brown further elaborated that Inngest leverages these tech advances and intertwines them to deliver a seamless, integrated experience. This fusion creates a robust framework that can effectively accommodate events, queues, function states, and serverless features.
Inngest offers a unique solution where developers can design serverless queues for TypeScript, simplifying the management of a checkout workflow, for instance. Developers are not burdened with configuration complexities. They only need to notify Inngest when an event is triggered, and the service will launch the set function. Inngest also provides automated handling of function retries if anything goes off course.
The platform lets developers use TypeScript or JavaScript codebase to have Inngest execute functions dealing with background tasks. As a result, operations like dispatching a welcome email for a new user can be taken off the API endpoint and managed by Inngest instead. This indicates that developers can conveniently build stateful applications utilizing serverless functions, blending with platforms such as Vercel.
As per Holdstock-Brown's explanation, using Inngest means developers can focus on coding and function writing without worrying about managing queues, handling configuration, retries, and concurrency. The platform takes care of these complexities automatically.
Interestingly, Inngest has found niche applications in the area of large language models, a field it hasn't initially considered. Given such models require tools for sequence management, retries, and state conservation, they are a perfect fit for Inngest's offerings. Inngest's tools simplify companies' operations in bringing their models into active use.
The seed funding and the subsequent product developments come as a boon for developers looking for a hassle-free experience. Developers have long adopted event-driven programming models and workflow orchestration systems to resolve complex issues, but this has led to extra workload managing new infrastructure. The problem arises even for basic functions like background tasks or managing the dependability of third-party APIs. Consequently, companies have had to dedicate entire teams to manage event queues, various serverless functions, and correspondingly, other databases.
However, with the unique set of tools that Inngest brings, a lot of this additional load can be managed easily. While Inngest has taken giant strides in the right direction, more innovation is needed to make application development flawless and efficient. Esteemed no-code platforms like AppMaster have already made their mark in this space, revolutionising mobile, and web application development. With its special ability to build stateful applications with serverless functions, Inngest is poised to emerge as another influential player in the tech ecosystem.
